If you’ve been involved in many home Bible studies over the years, you have probably noticed that no two Christians read a verse or passage of scripture precisely the same way, draw the same conclusions from it, or see the same significance to it. The worst ideas you’ll hear are way out in left field or obviously wrong, pulled out of the air by people who likely haven’t read the passage more than once. The best of them correct you where you may have erred, or supplement your own understanding with nuances you may have missed.
Maturity, experience, gift, intellect and Bible study habits all factor into the differences. Whenever you ask folks what they think about a scripture, be prepared for an earful.
Namechecked in Matthew’s Genealogy
I was thinking the other day about the Lord’s two genealogies in the New Testament. Luke’s may go all the way back to Adam, but it’s all men from one end to the other. Matthew’s only goes back as far as Abraham, but it includes four of the numerous women who were obviously active participants in eventually bringing Messiah into the world: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and “the wife of Uriah”, whom we know as Bathsheba.
I don’t have a regular Bible study group going right now, so let’s ask the internet: Why might four women be namechecked in Matthew’s genealogy of the Lord Jesus? That’s not common in ancient genealogies of any nation, and certainly not in Israel.
Great Women, Great Children
As anticipated, all kinds of ideas are floating around. First, Bible & Archaeology opines:
“Including the names of these women reminds the readers that Mary’s pregnancy and Jesus’s birth may appear scandalous at first, but it is only part of a long tradition of great women who give rise to great children, all of whom redeemed Israel and made it great.”
Hmm. If your theme is “great women who gave rise to great children”, perhaps you might have a look at the list of heroes and heroines of the faith in Hebrews 11. Yet of the four women named in Matthew’s genealogy, Hebrews commends only Rahab, the prostitute/traitor. As for the “great children”, Solomon was certainly great in his day, though he fell off a cliff at the end. Boaz seems to have been a good guy, but I’ve never heard him named among the greats. And Obed? Obed is a name in a number of genealogies. That’s about what we know about him from scripture.
Earthy and Authentic vs. Shiny and Perfect
Then there’s this, from Subby Szterszky at Focus on the Family:
“The women in Jesus’ lineage speak of other things as well. In the first place, they’re real women with complex and sometimes messy lives that can’t be reduced to stereotypes. They ground the Christmas story in an authentic earthiness. Their presence counteracts the tendency to idealize the Lord’s male ancestors as shiny, perfect heroes.”
I’ll go with the “complex and messy lives” in three of four cases, but I’m not sure we’d benefit from an “earthier” Christmas, nor do I think the Lord’s male ancestors generally get idealized. Scripture gives us no reason to do that, and apart from Joseph and maybe Daniel, most evangelicals don’t idealize men.
Name the Violence Inflicted Upon Women
Then there’s my favorite, from Robert Williamson, Jr.:
“One cannot tell the story of Jesus without also telling the stories of remarkable women, without whom Jesus would never have been. Yet nor can one tell the story of Jesus without remembering all of the tragedies inflicted upon women by men living in a patriarchal culture.”
Ah, the dreaded patriarchy! But why stop there? Oh wait, he doesn’t:
“In the same way, the genealogy of Matthew also calls upon us to continue telling the stories of women who through the centuries and even now have borne the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world. It calls upon us to speak their names and to celebrate their accomplishments. Yet Matthew’s genealogy also demands that we be truthful about the ways the patriarchy continues to infect the church. It calls on us to name the violence inflicted upon women by the church and to repent of our continued role in perpetuating systems of abuse.”
There’s the answer. The church must repent. Bleh. I’m pretty sure that was not what Matthew had in mind when he noted those four names. No, check that, I’m 100% certain.
Questionable Commonalities
There are many other explanations for namechecking these four women extant, no small number alleging commonalities between all four women. One questionable commonality, that they were all characterized by distasteful sexual histories, simply doesn’t work for Ruth. Another, that they were all Gentiles, is unprovable for Bathsheba and highly unlikely in the case of Tamar, as I argue here.
Let’s just say I find none of these conjectured reasons entirely satisfying, though some may be closer to the mark than others. Nevertheless, all this theorizing makes me feel like taking a crack at the question myself. Perhaps there is no definitive answer, but if we cannot hit the bullseye, we may try at least not to leave our arrows quivering in the hay bale five feet wide of the target. Let’s see …
Another Kick at the Can
Although we cannot confirm that every woman commemorated in Matthew’s genealogy of the Lord Jesus was a sexual sinner or a Gentile, we can probably agree that in one way or another all were outliers and improbable candidates to perpetuate the Messianic line. All had problems only faith could rectify, but that faith took different forms from woman to woman. Not only that, each of these problems is characteristic of everyone born into a fallen world. They are conditions with which all of us can identify, whether we are Jews or Gentiles, sexual sinners or virgins like Mary herself.
Tamar: Disinherited
Tamar had married into the family of Judah, a man who would eventually pass on his wealth to his sons, and especially to Tamar’s husband, who had the birthright and the double portion that came with it. Sounds secure, right? Well, it was, until it wasn’t. God struck down her husband Er for wickedness, then killed his replacement Onan, who rebelled against his father’s command to sire a child for his brother. Sensing a pattern, Judah sent Tamar home to live with her father, ostensibly until his third son Shelah came of age to father a child to carry on his brother’s name, but in reality until the end of time. Judah had no intention of losing another son, and Tamar knew it. She was cast out from the place of blessing and security (and out of the Messianic line too, though she did not know that), destined to age and die in her father’s house unless she could find a way to reclaim her rightful place in Judah’s family.
Something similar happened to all of us in Eden, didn’t it. One act of rebellion against God got us all cast out of the blessing and security of the Garden forever. Tamar could probably have argued that she wasn’t the rebel, just as we might argue that we never made that fatal choice in Eden. Still, a relationship Tamar did not control determined her fate, just as our relationship to Adam determined yours and mine.
Rahab: Dead
Rahab lived in Jericho. Jericho was under the ban, or ḥērem; given to the Lord to be utterly destroyed by Israel for generations of unrepented evil. She was not only a prostitute but also a dead woman walking, and she knew it. As she told the two spies she sheltered, “We have heard what you did to the two kings of the Amorites … whom you devoted to destruction [ḥērem].” She understood Jericho was next in line for the same fate as the Amorites. She was as good as dead.
You are I would be in exactly the same position as Rahab outside of Christ. The whole world lies condemned to utter destruction because of sin. “Whoever does not believe,” the Lord Jesus said, “is condemned already.” Not “will be condemned”. Not “might be condemned”. Condemned already, with no hope of appeal. As good as dead.
Ruth: Distant
Ruth was a Moabite. Like Tamar, she had married an Israelite man who died young, though probably of natural causes rather than the judgment of God. The difference was that her marriage took place in Moab, Ruth’s home. Her sister-in-law, also a Moabite, had the same problem and elected to stick with the familiar, but Ruth had grown attached to her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s God. She did not want to stay behind when Naomi returned to Israel.
Again, outside of Christ, we Gentiles were very much in Ruth’s situation. The apostle Paul refers to us in our natural state as “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world”.
The Wife of Uriah: Deprived of Fruit
Debates rage online about whether Bathsheba participated willingly in adultery with David, or whether she was the unfortunate victim of a man with too much power. Scripture does not tell us. What we do know is she was fruitless because of sin. Her child sickened because of the judgment of God, leaving her with nothing to show for the clandestine relationship: her offspring and former husband dead, her current husband and household under the judgment of God.
Like Bathsheba, we too were incapable of producing anything valuable or lasting apart from the blessing of God. The Christian is “created in Christ Jesus for good works”. His new nature gravitates toward harvesting souls and developing character qualities the Lord desires. The unregenerate man is incapable of pleasing him. Without faith, such is impossible.
The Role of Faith
Each of these women had a problem to which you and I should be able to relate, especially when we put them all together. The scripture pictures all of us as cast out of God’s blessing and protection, marked for death, alienated from God and unable to produce anything for his pleasure even if we wanted to. We were born that way, and we could not be any different. Like women in a patriarchal society (if we must go there), certain choices were never going to be on the table for you and me if Christ had not come into the world, lived and died on our behalf, and been raised as evidence of our justification.
Faith produced five squealing, squirming reasons for which we remember these four women in Matthew’s genealogy, though not in quite the same way. Lord willing, I will try to make that case in this coming Sunday’s post.
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